The Sable Moon Read online

  “I cannot help him,” Hal whispered.

  “I know it.” Lysse spoke with mindful understanding.

  “But the lad,” Hal continued. “He flees from more than sorrow, I think.”

  “You think he flees? From Gwern?”

  “Ah, the wyrd,” Hal murmured. “There is a portent for you, of great weight. I tell you, Trevyn will be more important than any of us, more than King, more than Very King. Of all the Kings of Isle and Welas, I know of none that have had a wyrd.”

  “Why, what is a wyrd?” Lysse asked curiously.

  “More than comrade, more than brother or blood brother, more than second self. Alan was all of those to me.…” Hal floundered. “How I wish I knew. I can only sense dimly that the wyrd is one who will be sacrificed when the time comes.” Hal closed his eyes. “Suffering and sacrifice—they are required of any true king. How much more, then, of Trevyn.… He will blunder into the teeth of suffering soon.”

  “I believe he has already begun. But I don’t understand.” Lysse creased her fair brow. “Who will sacrifice Gwern? And why?”

  “Aene. Or the goddess. For greatness.” He stirred slightly, faced her again. “There are marvels to come, a quickening, new magic, or old magic made new.… There are things I could never do, and they will be done. That mystic sword I found will be thrown in the sea at last; I have seen that. An elfin King must hurl it away, to end the long shadow of Lyrdion on our land. I was never able to do it; ’twas all I could do to touch that weapon once, then walk away.”

  Lysse leaned forward with as much excitement as he had ever known her to show. “What else?”

  “Something about unicorns, and the shape where two circles meet, the spindle shape. And the seeress … Trevyn mounted on a cat-eyed steed. Virgins and dragons … Do you think it might be a girl he’s running from?”

  “It has occurred to me,” Lysse snapped. “What was Trevyn doing on such a peculiar horse?”

  “Bringing the legends back to Isle, from Elwestrand. To travel to Elwestrand and return—I could never do that. It has never been done. But he shall do it. Trevyn shall, the young fool. I have seen.”

  “Mother of mercy,” she murmured, stunned. “You haven’t told him!”

  “I am not a half-wit,” he retorted frostily. “What is the good of a prophecy told? He must work it out himself, or make a hash of it, as the case may be. I’ve written it down among my things, for some scholar to grub up years hence. Then Trevyn shall have his glory, if glory is due.”

  “Mother of mercy,” she said again. “Unicorns stand for wholeness.… What are the two circles that meet?”

  “Gold and silver, sun and moon …” Hal’s voice faded dreamily away. He was tired, and spoke no more, then or in the weeks that followed. He lay in deep stillness. Alan stopped trying to talk him out of his strange trance, though he was full of anger that had no vent. Sometimes he climbed the tower stairs to Hal’s door and looked silently in for a while, then turned and went away. He would not sit by his brother’s side.

  Hal faded into brightness. Though he did not eat or move, his body remained beautiful—frail, scarred from old wounds, but glowing with spirit life. During the first days of spring, when a hint of green began to tinge the hillsides, Hal gradually, carefully ceased to breathe. Power and vision still shone from his open eyes.

  Alan could not grieve anymore; how was he to grieve for one who had not truly died? But Rosemary wept, for she was a woman and she knew her loss. Trevyn clung to his dream. When the trees began to bud and Hal still did not stir, his loved ones prepared to take him to the Bay, where, Lysse’s Sight told her, an elf-ship awaited him. Alan dressed him in the bright, soft raiment of the elves and laid him in a horse litter. Beside him Rosemary placed the antique plinset that had always been his comfort. Alan brought the mighty silver crown that had come with Veran to Isle.

  “Hal does not want the heavy crown,” Lysse said. “He told me so. He will be no king in Elwestrand.”

  Alan looked at the great crown that was rayed like a silver sun. The sheen of it was the same as the tide-washed gray of Hal’s eyes. Alan blinked and turned away.

  “It has no place here without him,” he said roughly. “He is the last of that line. I will throw it into the sea whence it came. Lysse, get him the circlet I made him, at least.…”

  Trevyn came out, leading Rhyssiart, his golden steed, ready to ride with the others. But Alan turned on him brusquely. “Put that horse away. You are to stay here.”

  Trevyn’s jaw dropped in astonished protest, and hot anger stirred in him; he quickly squeezed it down. He watched, motionless, as Alan and the Queens rode off with the horse litter between them. Arundel followed behind, riderless. Meadowlarks sang high overhead as the little procession moved slowly toward the Bay of the Blessed, a seven days’ journey away. Trevyn stood with his disobedience already forming in his mind.

  Chapter Six

  “I am going, too,” Gwern stated.

  Trevyn sighed, gloomily accepting that Gwern knew of his plans even though he had not told him. He scarcely ever spoke to Gwern, though he had not fought with him since the row over Meg. His dislike had not abated, but he had become somewhat ashamed of it. He had decided to be dignified.

  “Very well,” he replied coolly, then smiled grimly to himself. He judged that Gwern would not ride with him more than a few days. Gwern would not be able to pass the haunt that guarded the Blessed Bay.

  After nightfall they were off, with heavy packs of food stolen from the kitchen. Trevyn knew the sentries would be wary of him now, so they had to do some climbing with a rope. The Prince barely bothered to wonder why he trusted Gwern as his companion. Once well beyond the walls, far out on the downs, the mismatched pair called up some horses and set their course by the summer stars that hung low on the western horizon.

  Trevyn had never been to the Bay of the Blessed, but he felt sure he could find the way. He would show his parents whether he was a child, to be so lightly left behind! He rode hard, to be certain of arriving before the slow horse litter. Once he had passed the haunt, the abode of bodiless spirits, he need not fear any pursuit. No mortal could withstand terror of those unresting dead except a few who still remembered the mysteries of the old order, the sound of the Old Language. Among which few, as a Laueroc, Trevyn numbered himself.

  Within three days Trevyn and Gwern came to the end of the green meadows and tilled land, to the haunt, where the shades of the dead thickly clustered. Trevyn could feel their eerie presence chill the air. Smugly, he turned to watch Gwern shriek and flee. At last he would be rid of the muddy-hued upstart who hounded him! But Gwern only straightened to attention on his horse.

  “Dead people!” he exclaimed, with something like delight. “But why do they not rest? Whence do they come?”

  “How should I know?” Trevyn sputtered, fighting off his astonishment and the conclusions he did not wish to reach. Irrationally fleeing, he spun his mount and sent it springing into the haunt. Gwern followed without hesitation, and the wild terrain soon slowed Trevyn’s pace. He and Gwern picked their way silently between looming gray rocks and dark firs. Once through the invisible barrier, Trevyn breathed easier, knowing he would not be ingloriously escorted back to Laueroc. But Gwern still rode at his side.

  “I think they were gods,” Gwern said with the unreasoning certainty of a child.

  “Gods!” Trevyn snorted. “Only peasants talk of gods, Gwern!”

  “They were little gods, such as can be killed, and they tried hard to cheat death; they still try. But the great gods cannot be killed. There is the goddess my mother; her sooth-name is Alys.”

  Trevyn gaped at him, staggered anew. Gwern had spoken in the Ancient Tongue, which Trevyn had never heard him use before or expected to hear from him. He hazily sensed that Gwern could not have said “Alys” in the language of Isle or any language of men. But he thought more of his earthy companion than of the goddess. There was no escaping the conclusion now: Gwern moved i
n the old order. He should have known it the first time he saw him touch an elwedeyn horse.

  Gwern took no pause for his astonishment. “She answers to many names, but that is the most puissant,” he continued soberly. “Call on her when you have need.”

  Trevyn regarded his dun-faced companion in mingled wonder and suspicion. What was this Gwern, and why should he offer aid when Trevyn had never showed him anything but hostility? “I have been taught to call only on the nameless One, and that seldom,” he said at last.

  Gwern shrugged. “And what is this Aene?” he asked, again in the Ancient Tongue.

  “Dawn and dusk, the hawk and the hunted, sun and sable moon.” Trevyn impatiently parroted the words Hal had taught him; already he had tired of riddles. “What of it? Come on, Gwern, let us be moving!”

  The brown youth obeyed with a strange smile. Trevyn had just spoken the name of destiny, and in his ignorance he rushed to leave it behind.

  For another three days the two rode through a wilderness of jumbled stone and giant, lowering trees. They saw no living creatures except birds and deer and the elwedeyn horses that also liked to explore these parts. In time they came to the Gleaming River and followed it south, down to the Bay through which Veran had entered Welas. They reached that quiet expanse without a sight of Alan and the Queens. Signaling their horses to a stop, they looked out over the shimmering water.

  “There it is,” Trevyn said.

  Through the perpetual shadows of that dusky, brooding place moved a slim, gray elf-ship—a living thing, restless as a blooded steed between the confines of the shingle shores. Great evergreens towered overhead, the silvery water glimmered between, and the elf-boat circled like a swan, waiting. Trevyn moved closer.

  “Mireldeyn is coming,” he told the vessel in the Old Language. Then he gulped. “What in the name of—of my fathers is that?”

  Another ship floated close to shore near the mouth of the Bay, wallowing sullenly in the gleaming water. It was no elf-craft. It was broad, heavy, and high-headed, and it glittered all over with gold, shining like a miser’s dream. The railings were riotous with gold filigree. At the bow leaped a figurehead—a golden wolf with bared teeth of mother-of-pearl. Trevyn felt sick. This could be no mere chance.

  Slowly he rode along the verge of the Bay until he came to the glittering ship. There was no anchor or line holding it in place, no captain or any living being on board. The gilded wolf glared balefully, daring Trevyn to come closer. Grudgingly, he found a boarding plank, left at that sacred place from times long past, and he laid it to the polished deck.

  “Don’t!” Gwern whispered.

  Trevyn had never seen him so frightened. Gwern’s fear gave him a perverse triumph. Goaded, he stalked onto the golden boat.

  The very boards of the deck were gilt. Trevyn edged across them and looked below, every muscle tense with caution. He half expected an ambush of wolves or of wolfish men. Instead, he found casks of water and provisions for a long voyage. Then he felt the ship shudder beneath him, heard the boarding plank fall away. He sprang to the deck and leaped off at once, landing over his head in icy water. He fought his way to shore, sputtering. Gwern reached out to help him, and Trevyn did not scorn to take his hand. As he stood dripping, the wolf-boat clumsily circled and came back to its place.

  “In good time!” he shouted at it angrily. “I must say farewell to my father!”

  All his dreams of Elwestrand had been shocked out of him by the danger he had tried too long to ignore. He would be voyaging, but not to Elwestrand, he knew now. He might have let Gwern say his farewells for him, he reflected, but he had done that once too often already. Shivering, he rode into the shelter of the trees, and Gwern helped him build a fire. There he sat and warmed himself through the rest of the day and the night. The sleek elf-ship swam impatiently about the Bay; Trevyn could glimpse it in the moonlight. But the gaudy wolf-ship lurked stodgily in the shadows near the shore, flickering like marsh-lights in a darkened swamp. Already Trevyn hated its squalid splendor. He slept little and was glad to see the dawn.

  Rosemary, Alan, and Lysse came late the next day. Gwern and Trevyn watched from the shadow of a giant fir as the elf-boat sped gladly to meet them and nestled close to shore near their feet. Arundel gave a joyful whinny, the greeting of an elwedeyn steed to the elfin ship that was like kindred to him. But Alan exclaimed in consternation, “Look yonder! What is that chunk of metal floating there?”

  “Perhaps that boat does not concern us,” Rosemary murmured.

  “It does not concern Hal,” Lysse agreed.

  So Alan put the boarding plank to the elf-boat and lifted Hal’s still body from the horse litter, cradling him like a baby. He carried him on board his boat and settled him gently on the open deck. Hal would lie under wheeling sun and stars on his long voyage; his gray eyes gazed up serenely. Alan laid his plinset beside him, in the sturdy leather case Rosemary had made years before. Then he took the great silver crown of Veran and flung it with all his strength far out into the Bay. With a sigh that Trevyn felt even from afar, Alan knelt to kiss Hal’s quiet face, then left him there and stepped to shore. He looked at Rosemary, and she nodded.

  Alan slid the plank away. Instantly, the swan-ship glided off, over the bright water, straight toward the golden light of the setting sun. Gulls flew low, calling, and water rippled. There was no other sound.

  Trevyn watched it go. He thought he had put desire from him, but he had not yet felt true desire. He had never felt a force such as the mystic longing that took hold on him now. Scarcely knowing what he did, he started from his hiding place, running down the stony beach until his feet met the waves. He stared after the elf-ship, yearning. The sun reached out to him. The ship was a shape of marvel in its embrace. It swam swiftly away, at one with the wash of waves and the circling sea currents. Then it was gone, engulfed in the golden horizon, and Trevyn realized that the wash of water was in his own eyes. Still he stared westward. Not until the sun slipped from view did he realize that his father stood beside him, holding him. Alan, the great of heart. Trevyn had not yet learned the depths of his love.

  “You are quivering like a harp string,” Alan said.

  Trevyn shook his head to clear the haze of his trance. “Father,” he muttered. “I have grieved you, and I must grieve you more.”

  “Why, Trevyn?” Lysse and Rosemary drew closer to listen. Gwern quietly emerged from the trees.

  “I must go on that golden ship,” he told them.

  Gwern was expressionless, Rosemary too sunk in her own sorrow to care. Lysse looked at the wolf-ship with quiet eyes, seeking to pierce its secret. But Alan exploded.

  “If you had not been here, you would not have seen it!” he cried. “The elf blood is strong in you. I knew that if you came to the Bay you would yearn to sail, as Hal did.…” Alan choked and subsided. “From the moment he saw your mother’s folk taking ship to the west, he dreamed of the sea.”

  “I dreamed before I came to the Bay,” Trevyn answered in a low voice. “But the elf-ship is gone, Father. That gaudy boat will not take me to Elwestrand.”

  Alan stared at his son, truly seeing him for the first time in months. There was no glory lust in Trevyn’s eyes, no youthful impulsiveness. White-faced, the Prince looked as frightened as Alan had ever seen him, but still set in his resolve. “Where, then?” Alan whispered. But Trevyn had no answer to offer.

  Lysse turned from her study of the strange vessel, looked at her son instead, and he did not elude her gaze. “It is true, my husband,” she said to Alan. “He must go. There is a destiny on him.”

  Alan staggered as if he had been struck. “How can I know that?” he gasped wildly. “Suppose I defy this—this so-called destiny of yours, young man, and bid you stay. What then?”

  “Then I would defy you, and I would fight you, if it came to that.” Trevyn did not try to hide his misery. “Short of my killing you, nothing worse can befall us both than my biding here. No good can come to anyone who shirks
a destiny, you have told me. No good can come to us if I stay.”

  “It will not come to that,” Alan muttered. For Trevyn’s sake he would yield, though in all his life he had never surrendered with good grace. “Still, I do not understand,” he added bitterly, perhaps to the One. “On any other day or hour I could have borne this better.”

  “I can wait a few hours, or even a day,” Trevyn said quietly.

  “Nay, go if you must go! Are there provisions on that sickly ship?”

  Trevyn only nodded.

  “Confound it, let us be on with it, then!”

  They put the boarding plank to the gaudy wolf-boat. Trevyn strode off and fetched a bundle of clothing from his horse. Lysse stood probing the strange, glittering craft with smoky gray-green eyes. Only when Trevyn approached did she stir from her trance.

  “Your cloak,” she urged, motherlike. “It will be chilly on the open sea.”

  Trevyn got out the garment and flung it around his shoulders. Alan watched him intently, trying to seize the moment with his mind. Trevyn fastened his cloak, not with his golden brooch, but with a simple pin.

  “Your brooch,” Alan said. “What has become of it?”

  “I lost it somewhere along the road.” But Trevyn was taken by surprise, and the lie showed plainly in his eyes. Alan stared at him, stunned. Falsehood, and at this, the last moment they had to share! Trevyn returned his father’s gaze with anguish in his own. Then Alan removed the jeweled brooch from his own shoulder, the rayed emblem of the royal crown that he had worn since Hal had given it to him on the day of Trevyn’s birth.

  “That is yours!” Trevyn exclaimed. “Keep it. I can’t take it from you!”

  “Borrow it, then. Bring it back,” said Alan tightly. He pinned it over his son’s heart, wordlessly handed him a purse of gold.

  “I will. I swear to you I will return.” Trevyn’s voice shook. “Father, I am sorry—”

  “Hush.” Alan gripped his shoulders. “There is no need for speeches. Go with all blessing.…” He hugged his son hard and kissed him fiercely before he released him.